Irish radio plays with intimate theatrical force.
Drama On One presents standalone Irish radio plays with a close, theatrical ear for voice, place, and emotional pressure. Its stories move from Cork night worlds and Kerry households to reproductive taboos, grief, music, memory, and strange encounters.
PRESS PLAY
Drama On One is Irish radio drama presented as a changing anthology rather than a single-host conversation. Each play arrives with its own cast, rhythm, and emotional weather. The steady element is craft. Voices are placed close enough for small hesitations to matter, while the writing often lets place, memory, and repetition carry the plot forward. One episode can begin in a dark room with a couple circling an unnamed worry. Another can hand speech to the four clock faces of Shandon’s steeple and send them through Cork’s underground streams and living desires. The show is comfortable with ordinary domestic detail. It is also comfortable with heightened language, ritual, music, and formal experiment. Kerry Plates turns love of person and place into a story about secrecy and care. The Blue Hyacinth sits with Hubert after Rose’s death, where the problem is not grief arriving but grief refusing to come. Deep follows Larry Lahan into Cork’s 1988 house-music movement, linking a dance floor pulse to older histories of disco and escape. The Wickedness of Oz follows Debbie through daydreams, work, shame, love, loss, Dublin, Bondi Beach, and Hollywood fantasy. Oscar Night starts with two ageing sisters watching the Academy Awards, then lets a dangerous stranger disrupt the ritual. No One Ever Asked Me That puts reproductive choices, miscarriage, pregnancy, abortion, and stigma into dramatic form, supported by real stories from women. Eating Seals and Seagulls' Eggs reworks the figure of Peg Sayers through Irish, memory, schoolroom resentment, pressure, graveyards, and bitter comedy. The anthology can be tender. It can also be blunt. Strong language and adult subjects appear when the material calls for them, especially in plays about taboo, grief, danger, and sexuality-adjacent shame. The best episodes feel spoken before they feel explained. They let actors and writers make an atmosphere quickly, then deepen it through image, argument, and refrain. Listeners looking for plot-only entertainment may find it more theatrical and literary than casual. Listeners drawn to performed writing, Irish settings, and emotionally charged audio storytelling will find a rich archive of self-contained plays.
Made for: For listeners who like acted stories, literary monologues, Irish settings, and audio that feels closer to theatre than chat. It especially suits people drawn to grief, memory, family tension, city folklore, and formally adventurous storytelling.
What sets it apart: Its strength is the changing form: each episode changes cast and form, but the performances keep a close, human charge. Few anthology feeds move so naturally between domestic realism, Irish-language memory, Cork club history, taboo testimony, and mythic city narration.
RTÉ Radio Drama's audio theatre department has for decades proudly brought audiences the very best dramatic writing and performances for radio from Ireland. Listen every Sunday night at 8pm at RTÉ Radio 1, visit rte.ie/dramaonone for more.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Scripted performance, testimony and cultural memory meet in radio work that gives difficult social questions an intimate dramatic form.
Drama On One treats radio as a stage where private experience, cultural memory and invention can occupy the same intimate space. No One Ever Asked me That places opposing reproductive choices beside testimony about miscarriage, abortion access and stigma.
Morse code becomes a love language, and your headphones become the smallest theatre in town.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Two sisters' Oscar-night ritual becomes a comic, uneasy encounter with an escaped criminal.
Oscar Night brings ageing sisters Annabelle and Miranda into their annual Academy Awards ritual, only for Oscar, an escaped criminal, to arrive at their off-the-beaten-track home after a police van breaks down.
A direct radio drama about reproductive taboos, private grief and public stigma.
No One Ever Asked Me That connects miscarriage, pregnancy and abortion through the taboos that keep women's voices muted, following Jenny and Clare on opposite journeys along the same emotional path.
A graveyard shortcut and a mocked literary reputation become an unruly portrait of Irish memory.
A memorial stone, an old graveyard and a schoolbag in a hearse give Peg Sayers a strange, unsettled afterlife in this two-part drama. Her reputation among generations of Irish students sits beside the 1969 notice of her memorial in County Kerry, then widens into island life,…
Janis Ian turns memory, Dublin, and outsiderhood into songs with a quiet, lasting charge.
Janis Ian's songs come through as containers for memory, moving between the lasting ache of "At Seventeen" and the Irish history folded into "Mary's Eyes." She remembers writing "Mary's Eyes" during two rare days off on tour, seated at a Dublin hotel window, watching cats cross…
A codebook becomes a private language for desire, sound, and the unstable history of a shared life.
Marconi & Me turns a set of Marconi International Code Books into a private language for desire. A podcast producer finds the books and reshapes their Morse code phrases around her own life, following a relationship through sound, touch, limited English, and a flight into family…
Restored broadcasts, sharp shadows, bright old voices.
This is a promotional clip for the final episode of the Irish radio drama series 'Joe Johnny Joe' on Drama on One.
A podcast producer finds Marconi International Code Books and uses their Morse code phrases to narrate her personal story.
Singer-songwriter Janis Ian performs 'At Seventeen' live and discusses its emotional origins, including her mother's tearful reaction.
A journey across remote islands blending documentary and drama with sound recordist Chris Watson and writer Luke Clancy.
Hecuba counts her sons' dismembered remains while Troy's citadel falls around her.
A couple moves between Dublin and Kerry, and Maura keeps a secret from Tom until a lovable form of community care intervenes.
A radio drama exploring Cork City's night world and hidden streams through the metaphor of Shandon's four-faced clock.
A radio drama about an elderly man struggling to grieve after his wife's death.
A radio drama about a man reflecting on the summer of 1988 in Cork, Ireland, during the rise of house music and emigration.
A day in the life of a musicals-obsessed daydreamer named Debbie, blending magical and real journeys from Dublin to Bondi Beach and Hollywood.
Alan McMonagle's Oscar Night places Annabelle and Miranda in front of the 82nd Academy Awards, where their TV commentary on Julie Christie, Meryl Streep, and Kristen Scott Thomas keeps drifting into personal digs.
Clare says the abortion was "the hardest decision I've ever made" and that she was "the unlucky .01%."
Peg Sayers says she "spoke my book," not wrote it, and ties that to 70 years on the Leaving Certificate.
Kevin Reynolds explores James Joyce's time in Zurich through stories from the James Joyce Foundation, including his work on Ulysses and his grave.
A documentary-drama fusion exploring remote islands with sound recordist Chris Watson and writer Luke Clancy.
Two men navigate a series of mysterious rooms, uncovering their shared history through challenges.